The Health Impact Project: GAAP for HCIT ROI? LOL GTFO

In the second Chilcast episode featuring the Health Impact Project team, we go deeper with our exploration into the challenges of assessing the value of digital health and health IT implementations. This conversation explores the history of recent legislation and regulation that impact the healthcare sector, specifically the interplay between technology regulation pushed via HHS and care model innovation pushed by CMS. We also introduce the idea of a healthcare innovation version of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), with a brief exploration of why nothing like this exists already. As with most of these episodes, we conclude with a call for a collaborative conversation to drive industry maturity and improve patient outcomes.

The conversation captured on this episode, as well as the next group one, both tie into our recently published article, "When world's collide: How two decades of regulation both advanced and hindered our transformative vision of healthcare innovation."

Takeaways

• Legislation has played a significant role in shaping the adoption of IT in the healthcare industry, but has come up against care model reform legislation that often doesn't neatly align with IT maturity. This has created extra burden on decision makers who must balance these prerogatives.
• Challenges remain in assessing the value of technology, especially due to the complexity of current shifts in the economics of care.
• Our industry needs to develop its own equivalent of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for evaluating the impact and return on investment (ROI) of health technologies. This is complicated by the moral mandate of the healthcare industry, where the outcomes of "free market forces" are not always best for the population being served. Any calculation of ROI needs to account for this double bottom line.
• Collaboration and a shared understanding of value are essential for driving industry success with technology use cases, which in turn should improve  outcomes and experiences.